So you’ve made some friends on the internet. Me too! A lovely young chuck from Punxsutawney, she’s a sweetie. And writes a mean blog! But if you’re wanting to keep up with all your blogging buddies, you’re going to need a reader. Pull up a petunia and lets learn about Google Reader.

First, if you don’t have a google account, get one. Go here and sign in. On the left hand side, click the home button. If you’ve already managed to sign up to a few blogs they’ll show up in the middle pane. If not, it’s gonna look something like this….

Holy smoley.
Nobody panic, we can figure this out!
First, click on the Browse for stuff button. This is where we can have the most fun. Immediately ignore everything in the middle pane, and instead go for the buttons above, specifically the search button.

If you’re looking to follow blogs about people who carve hummingbirds from rare rainforest wood, go ahead and put that in the 1st box. The second box, you can put in a friends name or email address and search for them that way. I never have luck with that one. The third, enter your friends Blogger or WordPress address and click subscribe. And finally, the last box will keep you updated if there’s new Zippo Lighters on ebay or if Hugh Jackman has appeared on google news. Neat huh?

But Woodie, what if you’re on a blog and you want to subscribe to all it’s wonderfulness right then and there? Relax sweetpea, we’ll get to that!

Say you go to a truly wonderful blog like oh say, Smartass Romance. I hear they have a wonderful Wednesday guest blogger. =) Up at the top, in the location bar you’ll see the RSS symbol. Do you remember our post about RSS? Here’s where it’s going to come in mighty handy. Click on the orange button, and it takes you to that particular blogs feed. From there it might have a sign up form that says subscribe using Google, OR you can copy and paste that URL and put it directly in your google reader page. Go to the left sidebar (shown above) and click ADD A SUBSCRIPTION at the top, and paste in the URL.

Now, every time you go to your google reader page, all of the latest posts of everything you’ve subscribed to will show up in the center pane. See below, when I click on My Subscriptions, you can see a weeeeeee little picture of me!

Clicking on different subscriptions will bring up their blog posts. But what if you’ve already read those? No problemo. Lets look at this toolbar.

Under FEED SETTINGS you can set it to show the newest first, unsubscribe, etc. Under MARK ALL AS READ, you can change it to see everything that’s posted in the last day, the last week, etc. If there aren’t any posts in the last day, then you’ve read up on everything! Yay! On the right hand side of the tool bar, you can also click LIST which shows you just a listing of the posts, instead of a blurb. (loooove that word. Try saying it with woodchuck teeth)

Subscribe to a few of your friends posts, then play with different settings. If you check in every day, then change the settings so you only see new posts every single day. You’ll keep up with your buddies, and they’ll love you for it!

Carrie…I didn’t even know I had a Google Reader already! LOL I’ve had my gmail forever ;p Thank SO much for sharing this, my inbox has been overflowing with posts…I think the Reader will make things much easier.